If the EU didn’t exist, we would have to invent it

A serious attempt at democracy, in the sense of being able to influence the decisions that affect our lives, can only be done through solidarity with those in the European Union. Interview.

Ada Colau, leader of leftist coalition Barcelona Together, holds her baton, having been elected Barcelona's new mayor, Spain, June, 2015. Emilio Morenatti / Press Association. All rights reserved.Rosemary Bechler(RB): Wewere lucky enough to catch your
contribution to the BREXIT debate in a meeting at the TUC and more recently in
the DiEM25 launch panel discussion at the LSE – as a long-standing contributor
to openDemocracy on European matters, what do you feel your role should be in
this national debate?

Mary Kaldor(MK): I suppose what I think is that the dominant
debate is a very Establishment debate. Both the people who want Brexit and the
people who want to stay in are making very conservative arguments. Michael
Chessum had a nice piece in openDemocracy making that point.

And they are arguing about what it means economically for
the elite. (Actually Brexit are saying more about social justice than the
Remain contingent!)

I feel that there is a really important, progressive,
emancipatory case for Europe that is not being made in the mainstream debate.
That, I feel, is what it is most important to do. And the problem is that the
left are very ambivalent about the European Union because it is so neoliberal,
and so what we need is to put together a really enthusiastic left case for the
European Union.

RB: But can we only
really do that by talking about Another Europe being possible?

MK: Yes, though I
think we have to understand that the existing European Union is a funny
mixture. That was the argument you heard me put at the TUC, and it is evident,
for example, in relation to security. The European Union was established as a
peace project. For the first twenty years of its existence it did emphasis
social justice. It was brought together through economic cooperation, and that
involved the agricultural policy – which is actually a social policy for
farmers – the regional funds, which was really a social support for poorer
regions, and so forth.

The turning point was in 1991 with the Maastricht Treaty,
which I think was a compromise between the passionate Europeans represented in
those days by Jacques Delors, and Margaret Thatcher! It was actually us Brits
who brought neoliberalism into the European Union in a big way! And in fact if
we were to leave the European Union, I think we would be even more neoliberal
in our orientation. That is why you have got all the hedge funds arguing like
mad for Brexit, because they think they can have even less regulation outside
the European Union.

RB: And it’s why some
Europeans are begging us to go?

MK: Yes, some
Europeans do think that Europe will be less neoliberal without us. But there
are still very important constructive elements in the European Union not taken
into account in these monotone visions. The European Union is a very different
kind of animal from the nation state. The nation state was founded on war, and
has this sort of deep state at its heart, based on the military-industrial
complex and intelligence services and all of these things - whereas the
European Union is more like the United Nations, built on the idea that its
objective was to bring peace, even if its methods were economic and
social. And so it operates in a
different way, and you see that in the security field, in the climate change
field. Also what I think is very interesting about the European Union is that
it is much more open to civil society pressure, to ngo pressure than nation
states are.

In an odd way, we in the ‘democratic’ nation states have
formal democracy – but a formal democracy that becomes a kind of armour that
protects the deep state, because formal democracy always produces these
terrible Establishment politicians. Whereas
inside the European Union you have much more of a deliberative process, and
they are really seriously discussing a Tobin tax, a tax on multinationals, on
safe havens, and particularly in my field, security, the role of the EU is much
more to do with peace and justice, and intervening in conflicts in a different
way, even if they don’t get it right! It’s not a traditional defence policy by
any means. And if that could be given more teeth it could be really important
actually.

RB: Not surprisingly,
this is not the EU we hear about in our nation states. So when for example, we
hear that the EU’s public consultation on TTIP, which came out
fulsomely 97% against, was just ignored… you’d say that was far from the whole story?

MK:It is the states that were ignoring
that consultation. Remember thattheEuropean Union can’t be more than the
states that make it up and we are one of those states! Water privatisation was
another similar case. But the EU does have this emergent mechanism for the European
Citizens Initiative and that is quite important.

There is one other argument that I really want to make for
the emancipatory aspect of the EU, and that is the globalisation argument.
There is no way we are going to be more democratic outside the European Union. We
are actually going to be more vulnerable to multinational corporations, to
global finance than we are at present. And in a globalised world where many of
the decisions that affect all our lives are taken in the headquarters of these
multinational corporations, are taken on the computer screens of financial
whizzes – the nation state just doesn’t have the power to reclaim democracy.

That is a really important argument – that even if the
European Union is at the moment going with the winds of global finance and
multinationals, at least it is an institution which we can potentially use to
restrain it.

So if we really want to be serious about democracy in the
sense that we want to be able to influence the decisions that affect our lives,
we can only do it through something like the European Union – so that if it
didn’t exist we would have to invent it!

Alex Sakalis (AB): But
where would one begin to increase democratic accountability – given the many
barriers to the creation of the European Union as a bulwark against
neoliberalism and globalisation, it doesn’t seem likely…?

MK: No, at the moment it is the opposite. But the
nation state on its own is also the opposite. And the fact is that every nation
state on its own can’t do it alone. So the question is – how do we do it?

The way we must do it is through creating pan-European
social pressure of which DiEM25 is one example. I don’t think that the priority
is to call for a constitutional convention. The most important thing at the
moment is to push for a social Europe, and for a European security policy that
really addresses conflicts in a serious way. Because, I think everything will
follow from that.

RB: What kind of
impact do these issues have in the Brexit debate so far?

MK: None. That’s what I think we need to concentrate on. What
Yanis Varoufakis is doing with DiEM25 is great, because there needs to be much
more pan-European pressure from social movements. But one of the big problems
we have had up till now has been that the new movements on the left have
tended, I think, to be quite nationalistic, rather than pan-European in
orientation. But actually, what we
learnt with Syriza was that national movements cannot achieve anything on a
national basis. The only way you could manage to achieve anything is by doing
it in a European way.

RB: Do you think
Podemos sees that?

MK: Podemos has
the same tension. There are civic activists in Spain to be looked to in this
regard that are more progressive. Podemos is not the only element in play. Look
at what Ada Colau is doing in Barcelona, with city networks, and hosting
DiEM25. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Sadiq Khan extended a similar invitation to
London to mayors across Europe?

RB: Wonderful idea. Do
you think migration could be another opportunity for reinventing European
solidarity?

MK: Yes I do, and I think it is happening. There has been a
fantastic outpouring of people’s help for refugees, whether it is in Greece or
Calais, and bringing those people together could be incredibly important.

Again, the border policy that the European Commission came
up with for refugees was so much better than what the states came up with. It
is the states that are deploying traditional nation state methods – to
strengthen their borders. What does strengthening your borders do? It doesn’t
mean that you solve the problem in any way. You just make it more dangerous and
more miserable.

AS: But we can’t
ignore the deal between the EU and Turkey. Donald Tusk said no one has a right
to criticise Turkey, which now has a very laudable approach to migration! Clearly,
the good will of people has not percolated though to Donald Tusk and the
Commission. So what has happened there and how can social movements address
this?

MK: No I agree. I’m not defending everything the
European Union does, and I am not saying that social movements can have the
necessary impact to reverse such developments anytime soon through pan-European
pressure. But I am saying that this is our job. Our job is to try to put
concerted pressure, not only on the European Commission, but on our governments
who are the ones who make the decisions within the European Union. So it is our
responsibility to be doing that.

AS: Maybe we have to
concede that there are such differences between the political and social
cultures of western European states and post-communist European states, for
example, that a pan-European migration policy is just not possible at the EU
level?

MK: That’s a
really important question and you may be right. It is terribly sad what has
happened in eastern Europe and I think part of the problem was that Eastern
Europe became democratic at the precise moment that neoliberalism took hold,
and that its effect on those countries was devastating.

In countries that have been used to a fair degree of welfare
and equality, even if they didn’t have democracy and were totalitarian, that
totalitarian past where racism and tolerance were never discussed, plus the
impact of the inequalities and the unemployment that were then suddenly introduced
into these societies, ensured that a real tragedy is now happening in eastern
Europe.

Whether it can be shifted or not is a really important
question. Maybe it can’t be. But that doesn’t seem to me to be a reason why we
should vote against the European Union. I think we have to try and that we have
to work with the progressive groups that do exist in all these countries…

RB: … whose hope is
that there will be solidarity for them from across Europe.

MK: Exactly.

RB: So Mary – you said
that a television debate last night had you rather exercised?

MK: Yes. David
Cameron had just made a speech about how remaining in the European Union is
really important for our security. The BBC then interviewed David Owen, who
made a total mess in Yugoslavia, who said in so many words, “Oh, the EU was
hopeless on Yugloslavia, and everyone depended on NATO to come in and solve all
the problems.”

Now, it is certainly true that in the initial stages of the
Bosnian war, the EU made a mess of it. There were lots of options and they
didn’t really know what they were doing. And it’s also true that it was
important to bring in the United States. But despite the fact that people often
say that it was Nato bombing that ended the Bosnian conflict, this is not
really the case. It was because the various sides had reached the point where
they needed the international community to legitimate what they had done. And if
anybody from the outside had a salutary effect it was the British and the
French who lifted the siege of Sarajevo under a UN mandate, not the American
bombing.

The Balkans is a terrible mess and I am not going to be
uncritical of the European Union. But if you compare the Balkans with other
post-conflict areas, there are huge problems, but it actually is calm. And it
has been the combination of EU investment, the attraction of EU membership, the
whole accession process, which is actually a very different kind of security
policy, which has ensured that.

Then the second thing that David Owen said was that it was
the EU signing a deal with the Ukraine that had provoked the Russians to invade
Crimea, which I find completely outrageous!

I don’t want to defend anything the west has done. I think
Nato expansion was a mistake. Putin is quite right when he says that it was
illegal to invade Iraq and all of those things. But if you really want to know
why the Russians did what they did, it was because they were afraid that the EU
agreement would bring transparency to what the oligarchs were doing in Ukraine
and their connections with the Russians. And that is just what was required on
behalf of democracy in the Ukraine! So I thought that also was outrageous, that
he was allowed to say that without anyone coming back to him.

RB: Do you feel that
the BBC are hampered by the Reithian concept of ‘balance’ when it comes to the
EU referendum debate?

MK: It was
suggested to me today that if someone said “2 + 2 is 4” and someone else said
“2+ 2 is 5” – the BBC would feel that they had to balance these two views! But
I feel actually that the BBC is positively on the side of Brexit!

To return to David Owen, I have no idea what he meant when
he said that the EU was no good for our security, or indeed what the five
former Nato Secretary-Generals meant when they said that it was good for our
security. What I do think is that the EU represents a different model of
security that is the only model that is really viable in our global
interconnected world. There are lots of problems, but gosh it is miles better
than what the Americans are doing, or what we do on a national level, with
armies and defence policies that are totally counter-productive and very
dangerous!

RB: In your last
article for openDemocracy on this, you described EU policy on Greece as a
significant turning point, flagging up a real warning in the race to the bottom
that is going on. You wrote that there has to be a major reversal of policy if Europe
is to be saved.

MK: This is the case. The
most important thing that the EU must do at this stage is to hugely increase
the EU budget, to redistribute funds, to forgive Greece’s debts, to have a
Tobin tax, have a tax on safe havens, to put money into green investments –
these are the things that the EU has to do if it is going to save itself. If it
goes on putting this kind of pressure on Greece, on Spain – we can’t go on with
these austerity policies for ever. There has to be a reversal.

RB: Why do you think
so few social democratic parties have even begun to espouse that agenda?

MK: It’s very
like the 1930’s! The social democrats discovered that by becoming neoliberal they
could win elections. And they haven’t realised that times have changed. That’s what
the row in the UK Labour Party is all about. I think it is the total failure of
social democracy that actually is the problem.

The EU method was always the idea of low politics. The idea
of Monnet and all his followers was that somehow if you had economic
cooperation, harmonisation of laws, student exchanges and all of these things,
somehow Europe would filter upwards from these low politics. And it never did.

Actually, security policy is a really good example. If you
look at what the EU does on the ground in places like Bosnia, the Congo,
Palestine – the EU is funding the entire Palestinian Authority! It is supplying
community policing while everybody else is funding armed groups in one faction
or another.

But at a political level, the EU feels obliged to go along
with what the Americans and others do, rather than actually supporting
Palestine politically and explicitly. That is the problem: the EU has something
like a human security, human rights approach at the low politics level, but
this is not translated into human rights at the level of high politics.

RB: To do that you
would have to have a public that was more literate?

MK: More than
anything else you would have to have a European political class that was more
literate! The debate that we are having on the European referendum is
criticising and defending it at an Establishment level, but nobody is
discussing where we want Europe to be in twenty years’ time. This despite the
fact that nowadays more than 50% of young people in the UK go to university.
Most of them are engaged in European exchanges, and the Easyjet generation move
around Europe with ease.

It comes down to the inflated importance of the nation
state. In Northern Ireland and Scotland, for different reasons, they do better
at ‘getting’ Europe. For Northern Ireland, being part of Europe was absolutely
crucial for the peace process. The fact that both Ireland and Britain were part
of Europe meant that being Irish or British was somehow less important.

In the UK at this particular moment in time why is there
such an old-fashioned argument about Britishness, which seems to bear very
little relationship to people’s lives? I see it very much in the Defence debate
as well. Why are we having this debate about Trident – it’s kind of ridiculous?
– when actually the big questions are around conflict, migration.

AS: You say many
British people don’t get the EU, but in the EU you want them to get, in Austria
they have only just escaped electing a far right president who is virulently
anti-EU, and on the continent of Europe, in Hungary, in Poland, there are many
flourishing far right parties. What is to stop them getting that EU?

Mary Kaldor: If we just say, oh to hell with this, there’s
fascism on the continent… there will just be more fascism on the continent.
What we need is an EU that really addresses the problems that people face. It
may sound like vulgar Marxism, but from the 1930’s we know that unemployment
produces fascism. The EU has the capacity to solve those problems. I agree it
is not solving them. All I am saying is that without the EU, we will have no
mechanism to solve these problems. That is the point.

AS: 15 years ago, the
Freedom Party of Austria won the elections with Jorg Haider in a coalition
government. The EU’s response at that time was to say, “ No you can’t have
fascism in a European government: we are putting a cordon sanitaire around
Austria!” Today they don’t do anything to combat Orban, the rise of similar in
Poland, they do deals with Turkey… so aren’t we going in the opposite direction
from what you want to see ?

Mary Kaldor: Yes
– and we see it here in the UK. Look at this last mayoral election? It was
unbelievable to me that you would have Zac Goldsmith attacking Sadiq Khan for
being a Muslim and the Labour party attacked for being anti-Semitic. That kind
of really nasty politics, which includes the toleration of fascism is growing
everywhere. Why is it growing? In my opinion, it is because national
politicians of every hue are unable to introduce programmes that would actually
make things better for ordinary people, and so instead, they are appealing to
their deepest prejudices. Until you have serious programmes that do actually address
those problems of ordinary people, things are going to get worse.

The EU is not adopting a moral high ground at this point
because the EU is made up of horrible conservative governments like the British
Government, Hollande who is hopeless – there are compromises, but the EU cannot
be better than the states that make it up.

Fifteen years ago we wrote about oil states suffering from
the resource curse which meant that they got so much money from their oil that
they didn’t need to satisfy their citizens, they just needed to win elections
in order to get access to the oil money. We called that the ‘resource curse’. What
I think has happened is that after 2008, basically by saving the banks and
flooding the world with money, the ratio of finance to manufacturing has
completely changed. Governments are increasingly dependent on finance: which
then means that everywhere is becoming like an oil state, and all they care about
is getting access to government. They don’t care what kind of methods they use.
None of them, apart from some of the new insurgent parties, are competing to get
into government to carry out alternative social programmes.

But the only way capitalism is going to survive, if we want
it to survive, will be through investment in a green economy. This is an
economic argument. Business is being very shortsighted. They don’t understand
that we could have another phase of growth if we really invested in energy efficiency
and alternative energy.

On security, the old methods simply don’t work – none of the
old methods work. Bombing doesn’t reduce the number of terrorists: it produces
more. Unless we have an alternative security approach we are not going to solve
any of the problems either.

So their arguments that the EU is good – or bad – for
business or for security are really based on the same old-fashioned assumptions
on what business or security is, and we need to change those assumptions.
Capitalism can’t survive without state intervention – that’s my view. We can’t
recover without it. But not state intervention on a nation by nation basis. We
need state intervention on a European and global level. And not any kind of
state intervention, but state intervention directed at resource-saving.

About the authors

Mary Kaldor is Professor of Global Governance and Director of the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit at the London School of Economics.

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